


Hisstamine

by coyote_nebula



Series: Minefield [5]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Brothers, Dick Grayson-centric, Gen, Hiking, Hurt/Comfort, Poison, Snakes, Tim's superpower is random trivia, Whump, don't tell dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28847898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyote_nebula/pseuds/coyote_nebula
Summary: Dick gets bitten by a venomous snake. Tim pretends to know exactly what to do.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Series: Minefield [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044210
Comments: 34
Kudos: 267





	Hisstamine

**Author's Note:**

> I'm waist-deep in the sequel to Harvest (The Tamer), and it's got some big themes so I started a Grayson & Bruce fic to take fluff breaks (TBD), but it's getting big too and I wanted some fast gratification. So behold, an interlude where I experiment with these bro's voices before writing The Tamer's big family group interactions.  
> IF A SNAKE BITES YOU GO TO THE DOCTOR

“What do you  _ mean _ they don’t keep it in stock?  _ You just said it’s the most common snakebite in the country.”  _

Tim kept rummaging around in his backpack. “Yeah, but in  _ New Jersey  _ you’re only like, the fifth person to get bitten since either of us have been alive. And antivenom, one, is expensive, and two, has a short shelf life. Nobody in Gotham wastes money on it. Which is cool, actually. It’s a good thing. A  _ very _ good thing.” He triumphantly withdrew a black marker and held his hand out for Dick’s.

“I’m sure I’m missing something obvious, but  _ how is that a good thing,”  _ Dick grumbled, laying his shaking hand gingerly in Tim’s, watching as he uncapped the marker with his teeth, carefully dotted each puncture mark, and wrote  _ 0945  _ next to it.

He capped the marker. “It’s a _great_ thing, because it means we can totally take care of this without a hospital, which means the fifth copperhead bite in like twenty-five years won’t be on statewide news, which means Bruce won’t have to find out we both forgot our phones in the car and went hiking in the middle of nowhere anyway.”

“Tim, that’s a  _ terrible thing!”  _ Dick objected, cradling his burning hand close to his chest while Tim dived back into the depths of his bag. “I’d rather get told off by Bruce than  _ die on a mountain.  _ Not even a  _ big _ mountain! One that’s only  _ forty-five minutes from my house!”  _

Tim’s brief smile wasn’t reassuring. “You’re  _ not  _ going to die. I mean, even worst case scenario? I’ve seen you do lots of handsprings one-handed. You’ll be fine.”

After a few horrified seconds in which Dick tried to imagine his life with  _ one arm,  _ Tim laughed guiltily and glanced up. “Sorry. I’m kidding. Actual worst case, we’re talking like, fingers, okay? Probably. Unless something weird like infection or anaphylactic shock happens, and we’ve got those covered! So don’t worry.”

Dick tore his eyes off of the two little beads of blood on his left ring finger— shit, what if he got married someday? Where would he put the ring without a ring finger?— and stared at his brother. “Fingers.”

Zippered pockets buzzed open and closed. “Or not! Most likely, you won’t lose  _ anything.  _ I’m just saying if you  _ did,  _ you’d still be able to do everything you do now.”

“ _ Nightwing  _ and  _ Dick Grayson  _ can’t be missing the same finger!”

Tim had to have checked his whole backpack three times by now. “No big deal, we’ll put a prosthetic in the suit. We can even make it a projectile weapon; it’ll be awesome, like Geno.”

“... Who?”

“From the Super NES Mario RPG? That shot bullets out of his fingers? We don’t have to do  _ bullets, _ obviously. You could have tranqs, or smoke pellets, or trackers— or all of them, we’ll make it swappable. The possibilities are pretty much endless.”

Dick closed his eyes. “Tim,” he said. “Are you trying to distract me?”

“Is it working?”

“It  _ would  _ be if you weren’t giving me a panic attack in the process.” He opened them to Tim going through the zippered pockets  _ again.  _ “Oh my God. What can you  _ possibly _ be looking for?! I want to keep my fingers!”

“I  _ know  _ it’s in here,” Tim muttered. “I didn’t take it out, unless— aha!” The pink and white cardboard box was squished under the extra camera lenses in the main compartment. Tim wiggled it out.

Dick sighed. “Please tell me that’s not Benadryl.”

Tim was opening the tattered box and counting the pills left in the blister pack. “Copperhead venom is a weak hemotoxin. So, local tissue damage equals inflammation, which equals swelling, which isn’t great for blood flow, especially in your hands, and a lack of blood flow leads to necrosis—”

“I didn’t mean  _ tell me all the horrible details.”  _

“Let me finish. Swelling equals histamines.  _ Antihistamine _ ,” he said, raising the blister pack pointedly, “equals less swelling.”

Nausea rolled through him.  _ “Okay. _ Fine. Just... don’t say  _ necrosis  _ ever again.”

Tim was popping tabs out of the foil. He stared at them in his palm, lips pursed in Tim’s Mental Calculation Face before picking eight out and held them out to Dick. “Here.”

Dick raised his eyebrows. “I’m pretty sure that’s enough to knock a  _ horse _ out cold. No offense, but you can’t _ carry me _ out of here.”

Tim’s expectant expression didn’t change. “A horse would need more than twice this much,” he said seriously. “And I’m not. You’re walking.”

——

Tim was right. He was walking.

Weaving, tripping, and barely holding himself up, but technically,  _ walking. _

His hand felt like it was being repeatedly shut in a car door in time with his heartbeat, accented by the jarring of his missteps. “Ow,” he mumbled. It hurt like hell, but his eyes were  _ so  _ heavy and he wanted to lay down in the soft, soft dirt and  _ sleep  _ so bad he wanted to cry. __

Vision was something he processed in little pieces between long blinks, the blind steps between as dizzying as driving with the headlights off. He sort of saw Tim lean over to check his hand again, where he’d drawn a couple lines with his marker to note the extent of the swelling over time. “It’s looking good, Dick. Just a little farther.”

He started to say something like  _ you’ve said that ten times already,  _ but the words flitted away before he could catch them.

Something caught his foot _ ,  _ and his eyes snapped open just in time to see the ground coming toward his face. He managed to keep the bitten hand from smacking the ground, but the impact travelled into it like a bolt of lightning anyway. He stifled a scream in his arm.

_ “Crap,  _ are you okay? No, come on, don’t put your head down— sit up,” Tim prodded anxiously, pulling him upright. Rocks dug into his knees. Water dripped, then there was a shocking cold on Dick’s face. He recoiled, blinking. “Wake up.”

“Nnnh.” His eyes were already leaden again, but Tim was hauling on his arm and his sit ghosted into a leaning stand without any conscious input.

The zipper again. Tim must have the secrets of the universe in that backpack. He managed a look, and no, Tim was pulling out a camera lens. “Pictures?  _ Now?”  _ he mumbled.

He blinked again, and the lens became a cup. A mug? A hallucination? He blinked, but it stayed a mug  _ and  _ a lens, and it was being lifted to his face. “Take a few sips. I think it’ll help.”

The liquid was lukewarm and bitter. He coughed and groaned in disgust. Coffee. “It’s  _ black.  _ ‘N why’s it a camera? _ ” _

“The lens mug? Steph gave it to me so I could smuggle extra coffee on trips. Like this one. I hope you know I’m sacrificing my secret for you,” Tim said, then he felt it back on his lips. “Drink.”

He choked down three more gulps before the nausea threatened to undo his work. “Ugh...”  _ Don’t throw up... Don’t throw up…. _

A slosh; he heard a cap being screwed on. “Okay. I’ve got you this time.” They were moving forward now with his arm over Tim’s shoulder, because the quarter second snapshots coming through his ocular nerve weren’t doing much for his balance or navigational skills.

The caffeine helped a little, at least to where he could keep his eyes  _ open  _ more than  _ closed, _ but the arresting throb in his hand (his whole arm, really) intensified. He ground out a hiss.

This time he was alert enough to identify the worry on Tim’s face. “I’m okay,” Dick mumbled. “Just trying out… my new snake impression.”

Tim adjusted his arm. He was a little out of breath when he spoke. “We’re less than a mile from the car. Then I’ll make the call, you can sleep all you want, I can drink the rest of my coffee, and everything will be  _ fine.” _

Dick tried to take more of his own weight. He wasn’t  _ huge,  _ like Bruce or Jason, but he still stood over poor Tim. “Y’re a good… nrgh… little brother. You know that?”

Tim breathed a short laugh. “I let you drag me out of bed at  _ five _ this morning to come out here and get a sunrise photo for Barbara’s wall. I am an  _ excellent  _ little brother.”

He stumbled, and Tim’s grip tightened until he regained his footing.  _ “...Stupendous.” _ He concentrated  _ really  _ hard on holding his stomach down. It was tough with the pulsing scream of his hand trying to shout him down every step. He wasn’t sure  _ which  _ part the headache was from, the snakebite or the coffee or the worry that he might  _ lose appendages  _ because he didn’t look where he was sticking his hands for one stupid second.

To be fair, if somebody did a handspring off of  _ him,  _ he might bite too.

“Dick. You with me?”

“Hm?”

“We’ve got to keep walking. Almost there.”

Oh. He stopped. Was thinking too hard. He took another step and his awareness suddenly shrunk to the feeling of his foot hitting the dirt and his muscles deciding to just  _ ignore  _ the command to resist gravity. Like the last slurp of water spiraling down the drain, his senses went out completely as he unceremoniously crumpled.

And the ground was  _ so soft. _

The electric blaring of his envenomated hand kind of ruined it though.

_ “—Dick?”  _ The sound was blurry. A dull tapping lapped at his cheek, and the world slowly filled in like the sand in an upturned hourglass.  _ “Dick!” _

He hissed again. That snake impression needed more practice.

Drugged sleep beckoned, but at the same time the swollen stab coursing up and down his arm demanded action, wakefulness, his gears stripping in opposing directions. That was frustrating, and he was sick and Babs would definitely still like him with nine or less fingers, right?

At least it wasn’t Tim. It wasn’t even his idea to come out here. 

Standing was a joke. One thing at a time, though— he propped himself up on his good elbow and tried to swallow his dizziness. How to get his unruly feet under him  _ and  _ travel on them was still a perplexing problem.

_ “—ould have spaced out the dose—“ _

A  _ very  _ disorienting few seconds passed where he was being moved up and off the ground, and he clenched his teeth until he the pressing urge to toss his cookies faded into a moderate suggestion. He was looking down at the ground, and it was moving.

Holy crap. Tim actually  _ could  _ carry him. 

——

Not to say it was  _ comfortable,  _ not for either of them. They were both going to be sore. 

Both were too winded to celebrate when the car came into sight— Tim (whose bony shoulders made drawing a full breath difficult) was struggling with his brother’s weight on his back, and Dick was losing time to the not-asleep-not-awake fever haze, where everything seemed to take forever without him remembering any of it.

Being half-placed, half dumped on the hood of the car, he remembered; the out-of-breath call Tim placed from the car to Jason, he remembered; dozing shotgun and whimpering pitifully through every pothole, he remembered but would definitely deny later; the blanket and the hair-petting…

… that was blackmail too good to forget.

——

Tim and Jason snuck Dick into the Cave with the fervent secrecy of post-party drunks. He’d like to say he didn’t remember that, because the pain was getting a little  _ unreal  _ at that point and he finally puked getting out of the car. All over Jason’s boots.

That was  _ also _ blackmail too good to forget, unfortunately.

Once he’d suffered impatiently through a blood draw— because that was one antidote they were going to start keeping a recipe for— Tim got an IV started for a special cocktail of counteractive drugs and sedatives while Jason held his good arm steady. The swelling had ballooned his  _ bad  _ one, stretching up to his elbow before the burn quieted. He honestly expected Jason to comment on the gross sausage fingers, but he just pinned his other arm for the IV so Dick could keep rocking and bouncing and fidgeting his way through the  _ acid melting his tissues  _ without devolving into a _ total _ wreck.

Tim let out a long breath once he’d finished setting up the drip. “Okay. Sometimes swelling blocks analgesics, so it could be a while before it feels much better, but—”

Dick made a frustrated noise that was  _ not  _ a sob and Jason smacked Tim on the back of the head. “Dammit— what did I tell you about  _ discretionary details?”  _

“Ow. Sorry.”

Jason rolled his eyes in Dick’s periphery and sat on the edge of the cot. “Don’t listen to him. It’s the good stuff. You’re going to be sleeping like a baby by the time Daddy Bats figures out what’s going on down here, and I’ll wait until you’re back on your feet to exact my price for making that happen.”

Tim had started to walk off, but doubled back in alarm. “... what did you do?”

Jason waved a hand. “Go do your science shit, you’ll find out soon enough.”

Dick ground the heel of his hand into his temple. How much pain could you take before having a heart attack? Was there like, a quantitative number? If there was, Tim probably knew. At least he was keeping  _ that  _ information to himself.

Jason shifted. “Hey, dim the lights on your way out.”

Darkness helped a little. At least, it simulated his frantic desire to crawl in a hole and die, which was something. A particularly unholy wave of agony rippled through him, and he came out of it with his trembling fist wound up in Jason’s shirt.

“You got this, Big Bird,” he said quietly, unwinding him from the insubstantial fabric and inserting his hand instead. Dick gripped it gratefully— Jason was his younger brother, but with several inches and heavy muscle he wasn’t so “little” anymore. He wasn’t going to lie, Dick felt a little less like he was falling down on the job of being a big brother than with uncertain Tim, and that took some of the tension out. 

The razor edge was coming off the pain,  _ finally,  _ giving him enough room to swallow and take a deep breath. A dusting of the sleepy drugs fell over it. He was still sitting with his legs hung over the edge to stay moving, but with the sedatives asserting their presence he wavered. 

Jason gently took his shoulder with his free hand. “Doin’ good, buddy. How about you lay down so I don’t have to scrape you off the floor, huh?”

Dick grunted. That was probably a good idea. But  _ wow  _ his legs had gotten heavier in the last few minutes— Jason ended up grabbing the fabric of his pants to finish hauling them up.

The head of the bed was raised; he helped Dick settle down with Jason’s arm pillowing his head. The pulses of pain were still sharp, but somewhat less in his face now. “Y’re being nice,” he muttered. Jason was  _ suspect _ when he was nice.

“Eh, I’ve done the snake bite thing. It sucked ass,” Jason replied. “Plus I’m not showing my face upstairs anytime soon, so a nap is sounding pretty good.”

Halfway through the last sentence, Dick realized he was drifting off in the warmth of his brother’s side. He shook himself awake. “Wha’s going on up there?”

An amused huff. “My neighbor’s got seven dobermans, and the brat’s babysitting them for the day. Told him to tell Bruce and Alfred they’d be here all week.”

A surprise jolt of fire hit his arm; Jason squeezed his hand while Dick was doing his best to crush his in half. “You…  _ maniac.” _

Jason’s dry rasp was soothing. Of course, anything that wasn’t _ excruciating _ was pretty soothing at that point. “Damn straight.”

Dick sighed, falling into the relative softness of  _ ache  _ rather than  _ supernova.  _ Tim did good work. He should go tell him that. In a minute...

He must look asleep, because Jason’s voice was hushed when he spoke again. “Come on in, baby bird. He’s gonna be okay.”

“... You think so? He was… it wasn’t good.”

“You did better than the rest of us would have,” rumbled Jason. “You’re even more of a walking encyclopedia than Bruce. If he doesn’t give you an attaboy I’ll rearrange his nose.”

There was a long pause, and a smaller hand stroked his hair. “...Thanks.”

Dick smiled. Later, he could take credit for uniting his little brothers in a common cause. Right now, he was just going to kick back and relax into knowing everybody was okay—

—even him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry people always end up puking in my fics lol


End file.
